James Wilson

James Wilson, a Scots-born lawyer who had taken up the proto-revolutionary cause in 1774, had published "Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament," a pamphlet denying all authority of Parliament over the Colonies. (Though considered by scholars on par with the seminal works of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams of the same year, it was actually penned in 1768, perhaps the first cogent argument to be formulated against British dominance.)

He had been a Colonel in the 4th Battalion of Associators and in 1775 had risen to the rank of Brigadier General of State Militia.

As a member of the Continental Congress in 1776, Wilson had been a firm advocate for independence and had become an imposing figure looked upon favorably by his fellow Congressmen, but with Pennsylvania divided on the issue of separation, Wilson had refused to vote, not wanting to go against the wishes of his constituents.

Only when he received more feedback had he voted for independence.

Wilson has clearly been among the Congressional leaders in the formation of Native American policy.

Wilson has also served from June 1776 on the Committee on Spies, along with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Rutledge, and Robert Livingston.

They together defined treason.

A militia supporting price regulations and opposing Philadelphia's conservative leadership, in response to inflation, poverty, and food shortages that have been on the rise in the last three years, marches to Wilson’s house on Third and Walnut Streets on October 4, 1779.

Wilson and thirty five of his colleagues who fear the crowd barricade themselves in his home, which is later nicknamed Fort Wilson.

Five soldiers die in the short battle that ensues, and seventeen to nineteen people people are wounded.

The city's soldiers, the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry and Baylor's 3rd Continental Light Dragoons, led by Joseph Reed, eventually intervene and rescue Wilson and his colleagues.

Wilson accepts the role of Advocate General for France in America in this year.

The Carlisle Grammar School had been founded in 1773 as a frontier Latin school for young males in western Pennsylvania.

Within years, Carlisle's elite, especially James Wilson and John Montgomery, were pushing for development of the school as a college

In 1782 Benjamin Rush, a leader during the American Revolution and the preeminent physician in the new nation, had met in Philadelphia with Montgomery and William Bingham, a prominent businessman and politician.

As their conversation about founding a frontier college in Carlisle took place on his porch, "Bingham's Porch" will long be a rallying cry at Dickinson.

Dickinson College is chartered by the Pennsylvania legislature on September 9, 1783, six days after the signing of the Treaty of Paris that ends the American Revolution; it is the first college to be founded in the newly independent nation.

Rush intends to name the college after the President of Pennsylvania John Dickinson and his wife Mary Norris Dickinson, proposing "John and Mary's College."

The Dickinsons have given the new college an extensive library which they jointly owned, one of the largest libraries in the colonies.

The name Dickinson College is chosen instead.

When founded, its location west of the Susquehanna River makes it the westernmost college in the United States.

The Three-Fifths Compromise proposed by delegates James Wilson and Roger Sherman is a compromise reached between delegates from southern states and those from northern states during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention.

The debate is over whether, and if so, how, slaves will be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes.

The issue is important, as this population number will then be used to determine the number of seats that the state will have in the United States House of Representatives for the next ten years.

The effect is to give the southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free persons had been counted equally, allowing the slaveholder interests to largely dominate the government of the United States until the Civil War.

The Convention had unanimously accepted the principle that representation in the House of Representatives will be in proportion to the relative state populations.

However, since slaves cannot vote, white leaders in slave states would thus have the benefit of increased representation in the House and the Electoral College.

Delegates opposed to slavery propose that only free inhabitants of each state be counted for apportionment purposes, while delegates supportive of slavery, on the other hand, oppose the proposal, wanting slaves to count in their actual numbers.

The compromise that is finally agreed upon—of counting "all other persons" as only three-fifths of their actual numbers—reduces the representation of the slave states relative to the original proposals, but improves it over the Northern position.

An inducement for slave states to accept the Compromise is its tie to taxation in the same ratio, so that the burden of taxation on the slave states is also reduced.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is found in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, which reads:

    Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The three-fifths ratio had originated with a 1783 amendment proposed to the Articles of Confederation.

The amendment was to have changed the basis for determining the wealth of each state, and hence its tax obligations, from real estate to population, as a measure of ability to produce wealth.

The proposal by a committee of the Congress had suggested that taxes "shall be supplied by the several colonies in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes".

The South had immediately objected to this formula since it would include slaves, who are viewed primarily as property, in calculating the amount of taxes to be paid.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his notes on the debates, the southern states would be taxed "according to their numbers and their wealth conjunctly, while the northern would be taxed on numbers only".

After proposed compromises of one-half by Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and three-fourths by several New Englanders failed to gain sufficient support, Congress had finally settled on the three-fifths ratio proposed by James Madison, but this amendment ultimately failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required for amending the Articles of Confederation (only New Hampshire and New York were opposed).

A contentious issue at the 1787 Constitutional Convention is whether slaves will be counted as part of the population in determining representation of the states in the Congress or will instead be considered property and, as such, not be considered for purposes of representation.

Delegates from states with a large population of slaves argue that slaves should be considered persons in determining representation, but as property if the new government were to levy taxes on the states on the basis of population.

Delegates from states where slavery has become rare argue that slaves should be included in taxation, but not in determining representation.

The proposed ratio is, however, a ready solution to the impasse that arises during the Constitutional Convention.

In this situation, the alignment of the contending forces is the reverse of what had obtained under the Articles of Confederation.

In amending the Articles, the North wants slaves to count for more than the South does because the objective is to determine taxes paid by the states to the federal government.

Robert Morris is elected to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

He arranges to have Gouverneur Morris appointed to the Pennsylvania delegation.

Although Robert Morris says little at the Convention, Gouverneur and his lawyer, James Wilson, are two of the three most talkative men there.

Both oppose slavery during the Convention.

Gouverneur Morris writes the polished draft of the Constitution.

While it is widely known at the time that Morris is active behind the scenes, his only significant public role of record during the Convention is to nominate his friend George Washington as its President.

His nomination of Washington is done to end any questions as he is the only other person considered for that role by the leaders of the new country.

In this year, the Constitutional Convention declares that there shall be no religious criteria for holding public offices in the newly independent United States of America.

In September 1787, the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia issues the Constitution of the United States of America and elects George Washington president of Convention.

Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution prescribes that the "judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and such inferior Courts" as Congress sees fit to establish.

It makes no provision for the composition or procedures of any of the courts, leaving this to Congress to decide.

The federal judiciary of the United States is created by the Judiciary Act of 1789 (ch. 20, 1 Stat. 73), a federal statute adopted on September 24, 1789, in the first session of the First United States Congress.

The Act provides that a United States Marshal's primary function is to execute all lawful warrants issued to him under the authority of the United States.

The law defines marshals as officers of the courts charged with assisting federal courts in their law-enforcement functions.

The existence of a separate federal judiciary had been controversial during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution.

Anti-Federalists have denounced the judicial power as a potential instrument of national tyranny.

Indeed, of the ten amendments that eventually become the Bill of Rights, five (the fourth through the eighth) deal primarily with judicial proceedings.

Even after ratification, some opponents of a strong judiciary had urged that the federal court system be limited to a Supreme Court and perhaps local admiralty judges.

The Congress, however, has decided to establish a system of federal trial courts with broader jurisdiction, thereby creating an arm for enforcement of national laws within each state.

President George Washington signs the Act into law on September 24, 1789 and promptly submits his nominations to fill the offices created by the Act.

Among the nominees are John Jay for Chief Justice of the United States; John Rutledge, William Cushing, Robert H. Harrison, James Wilson, and John Blair Jr. as Associate Justices; Edmund Randolph for Attorney General; and myriad district judges, United States Attorneys, and United States Marshals for Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia.

Among Washington's initial six Supreme Court nominations, all accept and are confirmed with the exception of Robert Harrison, who declines to serve.

As a result of Harrison's refusal, Washington will later nominate James Iredell, who will join the Court in 1790, thereby completing the Court at its legally prescribed "full strength" of six members for the first time, and fulfilling the requirements of the 1789 Act.

Thomas Paine is a very strong supporter of the French Revolution that began in 1789; he had visited France the following year.

Many English thinkers support it, including Richard Price, who had initiated the Revolution Controversy with his sermon and pamphlet drawing favorable parallels between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution.

Conservative intellectual Edmund Burke had responded with a counter-revolutionary attack entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which strongly appeals to the landed class and has sold thirty thousand copies.

Rights of Man, a book by Thomas Paine, including thirty-one articles, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard the natural rights of its people.

Using these points as a base, it defends the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack.

Rights of Man had been printed by Joseph Johnson for publication on February 21, 1791, then withdrawn for fear of prosecution.

J. S. Jordan steps in and publishes the first part of the ninety-thousand-word book on March 16, three weeks later than scheduled; the second part will be published in February 1792.

It will sell as many as one million copies.

Paine argues that the interests of the monarch and his people are united, and insists that the French Revolution should be understood as one which attacks the despotic principles of the French monarchy, not the king himself, and he takes the Bastille, the main prison in Paris, to symbolize the despotism that had been overthrown.

Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges.
 
Government's sole purpose is safeguarding the individual and his/her inherent, inalienable rights; each societal institution that does not benefit the nation is illegitimate—especially monarchy and aristocracy.

The fuller development of this position seems to have been worked out one night in France after an evening spent with Thomas Jefferson, and possibly Lafayette, discussing a pamphlet by the Philadelphia conservative James Wilson on the proposed federal constitution.

Rights of Man concludes in proposing practical reformations of English government: a written Constitution composed by a national assembly, in the American mold; the elimination of aristocratic titles, because democracy is incompatible with primogeniture, which leads to the despotism of the family; a national budget without allotted military and war expenses; lower taxes for the poor, and subsidized education for them; and a progressive income tax weighted against wealthy estates to prevent the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy.

The immediate cause of the Panic of 1797 is a series of land speculation schemes that has issued commercial paper backed by claims to Western lands.

The largest such scheme had been created by the Boston merchant James Greenleaf and Philadelphia financiers Robert Morris and John Nicholson.

The new federal capital under construction, Washington D.C., required private investment for development.

By late 1793, a partnership of the three speculators had acquired forty percent of the building lots in the new capital.

Greenleaf had planned to finance these purchases with loans from Dutch banks, but the French invasion of the Netherlands had prevented this.

Lacking funds, the three speculators then formed the North American Land Company in 1795 to consolidate their land holdings from previous speculations.

They planned, once again, to sell stock in this company to European investors.

However, quick sales had failed to materialize as European investors grew wary of American land schemes.

Unclear titles and the poor quality of much of the company’s land had further slowed sales.

Morris and Nicholson had then begun  to finance their purchases by issuing their own notes, which creditors readily accepted because of Morris’s immense financial stature.

These notes had become themselves the subject of speculation, depreciating rapidly as a medium of exchange.

Meanwhile, continued war in Europe had constricted credit, exposing the precariousness of the North American Land Company scheme and others like it.

Rampant business failure had plagued Eastern port cities by late 1796, and land speculators less preeminent than Morris soon found themselves in debtors’ prison.

Among these was James Wilson, whose confinement, combined with rumors of Morris’s imprisonment, had causes panic.

Morris and Nicholson’s notes, by now totaling ten million dollars, had begun trading at just one-eighth their value.

By 1797, their paper pyramid collapses altogether.

Across the Atlantic, British legislation exacerbates the damage wrought by the bursting land speculation bubble.

The monetary strain imposed by the French Revolutionary Wars and withdrawals by panicked depositors have greatly depleted the coin and bullion reserves of the Bank of England.

This prompts Parliament to pass the Bank Restriction Act of 1797, which halts specie payments.

The disruption of access to British gold and silver unravels the Atlantic credit web, hastening the collapse of Morris’s and other speculation schemes.